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VIRGINIA 



Address delivered in response to the toast " Virginia," at the 

banquet given by the citizens of Petersburg, Va., to the 

President of the United States and the Governor 

of Pennsylvania, on May 19, 1909 



BY 



EDWIN A. ALDERMAN 






A response to the toast " Virginia," at the banquet 
given by the citizens of Petersburg, Virginia, to the 
President of the United States and the Governor of 
Pennsylvania, on May 19, 1909, by Edwin A. Alderman 



VIRGINIA. 

Whenever men join in tribute to other men who were willing 
to sacrifice themselves for a conception of public duty, the whole 
human mass moves forward in the way of brotherhood. One 
may, with entire restraint, call this day, which we have spent in 
this historic city, a day of dignity and high feeling. Even if the 
Chief-Magistrate of the Republic had not honored it by his 
kindly presence, its own memories, sincerities, and fraterni- 
ties would suffice to set it apart for remembrance and respect. 
Pennsylvania and Virginia are tied together by many unbreak- 
able bonds of common ancestry, common glory, and common 
tragedy. Staunton and Pittsburg were once in the same county 
in the far off days when Virginia was so inclusive a term as to 
cover most of the country. Valley Forge and Germantown loom 
back of Gettysburg. Back of civil strife may be seen the brotherly 
forms of Washington and Franklin, and Independence Hall in 
Philadelphia and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia are forever united 
in the thought of the world. Among the men who charged with such 
wild valor at Gettysburg, and the men who stood with such gran- 
ite firmness, were the same German and Scotch Irish breeds wdio 
had peopled the Appalachians and had made the Shenandoah Val- 
ley the cradle of American democracy. Save perhaps at Dunbar 
and Naseby field, so large a proportion of brothers in blood of our 
race had never before met in shock of battle. It is fortunate for a 
republic like ours that great states like Pennsylvania and Virginia 
can turn from contemplation of their differences to warm their 
at tin' fire of common glories, for in that warmth such gross 
dross a- hate and unforgiveness are consumed and pass away. 

The State of North Carolina was my birthplace. I am pro- 
foundly grateful for the privilege of birth among that brave, self- 

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reliant, modest, and progressive people whose virtues are such as 
to guarantee to my mind that a democracy such as theirs will be 
the final form of government. I have for that state and that 
people the enduring love which a son should bear to a proud and 
generous mother. Virginia is my home, and I have learned to 
love her and her people as all must who taste the quality of Vir- 
ginia life. What strength I have is spent in the service of Vir- 
ginia, and I rejoice in the opportunity of rendering, in this 
inspiring presence, that discriminating praise of her which all 
Americans owe, and which both love and reverence for her impel 
me to utter. 

We of the South are sometimes laughed at gently for our sen- 
sitiveness to local things and our pride of State. Let us not be 
laughed out of this sentiment. I am an American, and feel utterly 
at home in this republic of my fathers, to which I owe and give as 
supreme affection and allegiance as if these bullets had never sped 
across the fields of civil strife. There is a weak and evil sectional- 
ism which distrusts all who do not live in its particular region. 
There is, as well, a fruitful and noble sectionalism which simply 
exalts love of home, and interest and affection for one's neighbors. 
Out of such sectionalism as this have come the great literatures of 
the world, the great unselfishnesses, the great heroisms, the great 
sacrifices, the great men. I speak in no parochial spirit, there- 
fore, when I say that Virginia seems to me the most distinguished, 
the most engaging, the most unselfish, and, in a spiritual sense, 
the most fruitful of American Commonwealths. 

Perhaps the supreme distinction of all life is motherhood. No 
one can deny to Virginia the authority that springs from the 
motherhood of this republic. Our civilization began on her 
watercourses, and our democracy was cradled in her mountain 
valleys. The story of John Smith and the arrival of the slave ship 
stamp her dimmest beginnings with a stamp of romance and trag- 
edy. The Mayflower is an epic ship sailing westward on 
an unknown sea bringing to these shores a breed of men who 



bore with them the town meeting, the public school, an appre- 
ciation of the value of the common man, and an indomitable ca- 
pacity. Institutions and ideas were in their right hand, and in 
their left hand a wilfulness, a foresight, and a common sense a& 
inflexible as granite. They, too, builded a mighty Commonwealth 
which became the mother of states. No less epic are the ships 
that bore to Tidewater Virginia men whose souls were wrought in 
the same revolutionary lire in the old home land. It is very silly 
to think of Virginia as springing from the loins of the butterflies 
of British aristocracy. These men, too, knew what it meant to 
die for a cause, and their conception of political liberty was just 
as clear and their genius for political expression perhaps a little 
clearer than that of the voyagers in the Mayflower. 

Out of their ranks came our supreme national hero and a group 
of resourceful men without whose influence it is difficult to see 
how the nation could ever have been born. They were able to 
achieve, besides, a manly personal charm, a grand manner, a cath- 
olic lovableness, the simplicity that belongs to a shepherd with the 
pride that belongs to a king, that established them forever in the 
affections of men. How cheapened of distinction and impover- 
ished of dignity would be our national life if it were bereft of the 
glorified common sense of George Washington, the human sym- 
pathy and cosmopolitanism of Thomas Jefferson, the instinct for 
duty and the calm forbearance and lofty wisdom of Robert E. 
Lee, who long generations afterwards flowered into the rose 
of his stately and tolerant manhood, very like the old stock, 
only gentler and more able, through virtue and suffering, to 
evoke the love of millions. Two such men as Washington 
and Lee in one century give to Tidewater Virginia the same 
sort of distinction which Pericles and Leonidas give to the 
Grecian Archipelago, for, after all, it is the output of great men 
that makes fame and friends for nations. Mr. Choate once told 
the English that the chiefesf industry of America was education: 
so 1 may say that the chiefesl contribution of Virginia to Amen- 



can life has been men, great governmental ideas, and a great 
spirit. If a stranger to American institutions should inquire who 
founded this republic, who shaped its structures for the ages, and 
who breathed into it the spirit that has enabled it to become the 
most venerable and impressive of all republics, a truthful answer, 
whoever it might exclude, would certainly include the names of 
Patrick Henry, George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas 
Jefferson, James Madison, John Marshall, James Monroe, George 
Mason, and many more less known to world-fame but a part of 
the amazing outburst of intellectual energy that came out of this 
Commonwealth to set the framework of our great popular experi- 
ment in forms of imperishable strength and beauty. 

From Virginia's life arose the genius that clothed in noble 
phrase the reasons for revolution ; that guided victoriously the 
legions of war ; that bore foremost initiative in shaping the con- 
stitution ; that interpreted its spirit ; that widened colonial vision 
from provincialism to empire ; and that fixed faith in average 
humanity as the philosophy of a new civilization. But it is as a 
land of the spirit that Virginia seems most majestic to me and 
most moving to any generous soul. Mere lists of measures trace- 
able to her soil, or mere lists of great men who adorn her annals, 
do not convey adequately her message to this upward-striving de- 
mocracy. That message is best conveyed by her spirit and that 
spirit is best summed up in three words — unselfishness, devotion 
to duty, and love of home. Can any message be more needed by 
our over-nourished, over-specialized, nervous society, suffering, it 
seems to me, from the very excesses of energy and achievement? 

When in the interests of stability and union it seemed necessary 
to surrender an imperial domain to the young government, for 
which she had sacrificed so much, Virginia made that surrender 
without reservation, without haggling or bargaining, and with a 
graciousness and dignity that add a certain splendor to that crit- 
ical, suspicious, and unlovely period in our progress toward na- 
tionality. The states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, 111- 

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inois were carved out of that gift. One of them, at least, Ohio, 
lias reached the point of contesting with her ancient mother the 
authority of being the mother of Presidents. Virginia can bear 
her success in this high emulation with fortitude, for she feels 
that Ohio's sons, including our distinguished guest to-day, the 
honored and beloved President of a reunited country, are the re- 
sults of Virginia's generosity and partake of Virginia's spirit. Not 
content with this large gift of empire, like a thoughtful mother, 
Virginia assumed the task of providing for the guidance of the 
future populations of her surrendered domain, the genius of her 
great philosopher and friend of men, Jefferson, guiding her pen, 
and in the Ordinance of 1787, practically created a new "magna 
charta" which gave to that community the benefits of enlightened 
freedom in a larger way than had ever before been accorded to 
pioneers in new lands. I confess that there is no more painful 
circumstance to me in our history than the fact that this gracious 
and generous Commonwealth was one day to have what was left 
of its modest territory sundered and violated as a penalty for its 
devotion to an ideal of public duty. 

It was reserved, however, for the Civil War and its conse- 
quences to test to the uttermost the spirit of Virginia and to prove 
that spirit pure gold. Do not fancy that I have the purpose to 
analyze the causes of this war, or to kindle from their ashes the 
fires that once burned so fiercely here and elsewhere through the 
land. The war between the States was a brothers' war, brought on, 
as our human nature is constituted, by the operation of economic 
forces, the clashing of inherited feelings, the impact of differing 
notions about the meaning of liberty woven by no will of either 
section into the very fabric of the people's life. Thus fate driven, 
the sections came to war embodying in stern antagonism two ma- 
jestic ideas — the idea of local self-government and the idea of 
union. No war in human history was a sincerer conflict than this 
war. It was not a war for conquest or glory. To call it rebellion 
is to speak ignorantly; to call it treason is to add viciousness to 

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stupidity. It was a war of ideas, principles, political conceptions, 
and of loyalty to ancient ideals of English freedom. 

Virginia did not enter this war with a light heart. She loved 
the Union, for it was her child. Calmly, patiently, sadly, without 
haste or passion, save a certain anguish of spirit, Virginia made 
her choice while all the world awaited breathlessly which way 
would fall her decision, and which way her great authority. 
True to character, Virginia went the old path of sympathy, 
idealism and unselfishness, and a certain grand accounting of 
honor more than life and loyalty more than gold. With every- 
thing to lose and nothing to gain materially by her decision, 
she yet made it proudly, because to her mind the oldest and 
noblest conception of freedom was local self-government, and to 
her heart, as one might expect from a mother of states, came the 
appeal of her children on the Gulf plains and the Atlantic Sea- 
board — lands populated by her sons, and looking to her for guid- 
ance and leadership in the troubled seas sweeping about them. 
They were younger Virginias crying to the mother for help 
in an hour of doubt and peril. These younger Virginias in the 
hot blood of youth and pride of growth had gone beyond the old- 
mother in a tragic and supreme adventure. Now they were needing 
her ancient supremacy and her maternal counsel. No such com- 
pelling tide of sympathy and love and responsibility joined with a 
clear perception of constitutional justice ever before swept a great 
State to a supreme decision. Virginia, therefore, the builder of 
states and lover of peace, became the battlefield of a mighty 
struggle, and entered upon the course that caused her to ex- 
perience a discipline of war and its consequences unknown to any 
other American community. Beleaguered cities, devastated valleys,, 
ruined fields, precious life wasted, and all the land red like blood. 
This was the allotment of fate to Virginia. It is no coincidence 
that Yorktown and Appomattox, our mightiest American happen- 
ings, fell in Virginia. They fell there because Virginia was the 
root of the matter in both of the great crises. 



To the material vision Virginia seemed ruined indeed when the 
storm had passed, hut now we know that it was not so. She had 
suffered more than any country save Poland, and Poland ceased 
to exist. There was poverty in Virginia and throughout the 
South, but it begot strength : there was wounded pride, but 
it begot in big hearts, a noble humility : there was lack of 
energy in law and order in society, but it begot self-reliance 
and constructiveness : and somehow the love of millions lightened 
the gloom of the war-smitten land. By the might of great 
sacrifice, and great achievement, and great fortitude, Virginia 
achieved a spiritual authority over the hearts of Americans 
that she could not have won by the most astonishing material 
success. The golden peace in which the old State had been 
lapped for a generation had given no successors to the great 
dynasty of the past. The age of war and economic ruin, through 
the immortal careers of Lee, Jackson, Johnston, Stuart, and a 
goodly host of others, established a new dynasty of virtue and 
genius. The State became the State of memories to the old who 
had traversed its fields and red hills in the pride of youth and in 
the pomp of war, and it became a land of spiritual values to the 
young in the North and in the South who invested it, with youth's 
generous ardor, with the consecration that belongs to regions 
where great deeds have been done and great martyrdoms endured. 

Sympathetic and curious friends from other lands and states 
sometimes wonder why Virginia and the South give to General 
Lee a sort of intensity of love that they do not give even to Wash- 
ington. The reason is simple to those who know Virginia and 
Lee. Washington stands high, clean, spotless, like the shaft that 
commemorates his fame in the national capitol, at the gateway of 
our republican history symbolizing the majesty of the era of 
origins and success. Lee is a type and an embodiment of all 
the best there is in the sincere and romantic history of the whole 
State. Its triumphs, its defeats, its joys, its sufferings, its re- 
births, its pride, its patience center in him. In that regnant 

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figure of quiet strength and invincible rectitude and utter self- 
surrender may be discerned the complete drama of a great 
stock. As he stood at Arlington on that fateful day in 1861, 
smiting his hands in agony over a decision he needs must make, 
his agony was his people's agony: as he rode in triumph, by 
virtue of genius and valor, through the storm of victorious 
battle, his glory was their glory: as he stood forth amid all 
vicissitudes, ever unshaken of disaster or unspoiled by success, 
his fortitude was their fortitude : as the result of the Great 
Appeal was seen to rest at last upon his broad shoulders and 
his stout heart, his constancy was their constancy: as he stood 
at the end amid the shadows of defeat, an appealing and uncon- 
querable figure of virtue, of service, and of dignity, his dignity 
was their dignity: and somehow in the majesty of his manner 
and bearing, he reached back into the very roots of the proud 
past of the Old Dominion and connected its golden age and its 
ancient authorities, its long and happy peace with the trouble 
and wonder of the present. And now, in this hour of reunion 
and reconciliation, we know how, in those five quiet, laborious 
years at Lexington he, symbolized the future for us as it has come 
to pass, and bade us live in it, in liberal and lofty fashion, with 
hearts unspoiled by hate and eyes clear to see the needs of a new 
and a mightier day. Can you wonder at the measure of the love 
a people bear for such an embodiment of their best? Surely God 
was good and full of thought for a people to set in the forefront 
of their life, a figure so large and ample and faultless. 

Gone from Virginia forever, let us hope, are the days of suffer- 
ing and privation. Progress and peace rule her counsels and pros- 
perity smiles upon her fields. Wealth is pouring into her coffers. 
Hope and capacity and genius for adjustment glow in the hearts 
and minds of her sons. Faith in all her people, whether they issue 
out of the old stock chastened by fortitude and woe, or out of the 
plain people who fought her battles for her, is now her chiefest 
passion and their education her chiefest concern. Secure in the 

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dignity of a spiritual authority which she has earned, Virginia 
holds up her head among her sisters even more proudly than in 
the older time when she gave rulers and law to the young republic, 
for her pride is more completely that just pride that springs out 
of intelligent devotion to all classes of her people. 

Enriched by the spirit of a gentle civilization flowing about her 
for generations, protected by the love and veneration of thousands, 
and busy with a multitude of schemes for her own social better- 
ment, she will yet not be turned aside from the glory and privilege 
of sharing in the inevitable remaking of the legal framework and 
the social spirit of the unrended country to which she gave birth 
and which she nourished in its helpless youth. There is a simple 
and holy feeling in her heart that the whole nation needs in a pe- 
culiar sense the strength and virtue which she has to contribute to 
its life, and that, in some grave hour of national peril yet to come, 
as such hours must come to every democracy, out of her uncor- 
rupted, abounding life shall issue leadership and guidance for the 
great republic cradled on her soil, and now grown so great. 

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